Knife Fail: Grand Way Post-Mortem

One of the most essential survival tools is a good knife. This is not a good knife. Testing to failure should not mean making a couple small chops only for the hilt to start rattling!

I was given this knife and told to try it out. I am no bushcraft survival guru, just a guy who lives in the woods. Any knife should be able to survive me using it, but Grand Way Knives live up to their name only in grand failure!

Let's go into specifics. A knife is fundamentally a sharp bit of metal with a place to hold it safely. A good knife is tough, sharp, and solidly constructed. Most hunting/bushcraft/survival knives consist of a sturdy blade made from good steel, a guard to keep your hand from sliding on to the blade, and a hilt offering a comfortable grip with ergonomic handling so you maintain control over the blade. It should be tough enough to handle misuse and abuse.

The blade is a bit thin, and looks like a cheaper grade of stainless steel, so it already strikes me as a light-duty knife at best. It says it's 440C, but how do I know if that is even accurate?

A good knife usually has a tang running the full length of the hilt. Either the metal of the blade blank extends behind the guard and is sandwiched between scales riveted to the sides, or narrows to a sort of rat-tail profile topped off by a pommel that is either pinned through the tang, or the tang is peened over by hammering it until the metal mushrooms into a rivet-like lock.

When you can't see the tang, you have to look for evidence of pins or peening. Good knives can hide these features well with fit and finish. OK knives leave obvious signs. At first, this looked like it might have a tolerably tough peened tang despite my misgivings about that solid wood. Heh. That sounds ever so slightly like a dirty joke. Too bad the knife is a joke, too.

See how badly the wood and the metal line up? It didn't start out looking like that. I got suspicious. I had another knife fail similarly years ago, so I had a hunch and I tried twisting the pommel.

It unscrewed.

That's not how this should work at all!

They used some kind of shitty glue to make up for abysmal fit and finish on top of poor construction here. I can forgive the obvious cast finish inside the pommel. Casting is not a bad process for that kind of part IF IT WERE PART OF A WELL-MADE KNIFE! Here, though, it is just more evidence that Grand Way built their product line by putting lipstick on a pig.

Just look at that abomination. Not even an inch of actual tang behind the blade. A sloppily tack-welded bit of mild steel rod. Adhesive goop everywhere. A badly drilled block of wood. This is not how you make a good knife, period. Hell, the nylon sheath is the BEST part of this package, and it's crap, too!

Get a good knife from the start. A bad knife is worse than no knife, because a bad knife gives the illusion of preparedness and risks injuring you when it breaks. Buy once, cry once. And the saddest part is these crap knives often cost almost as much as a decent one!